Last Saturday, the assistant director for Youth, Justice and Communities, Neil Consterdine , community safety manager Lorraine Kenny and I delivered a presentation to the Overview and Scrutiny Board at Oldham Council about Youth Violence and the Oldham Youth Offer.
I talked about the background. Out of the 13,426 young people who voted in #MakeYourMark last year, the highest number of votes went to ‘put an end to knife crime’. Following this result the Youth Council did a consultation and made a report.
We then took this to Full council and asked them to look at the support, provision and resources young people have access to.
Full council committed a £100,000 investment into young people’s services following the motion.
Neil then talked about the investment in youth services and where the money had come from incl the council leaders pledged money and community safety funds. He talked about the resources needed to deliver the project including 8 youth worker posts – 2 full time and 6 part time. He went on to talk about developing the district youth offer which included finding out what there actually is and promoting it as well as delivering targeted youth programs across Oldham .
Lorraine then talked about the community safety response and grant funded activity. She mentioned how the cuts to youth services for so long may mean a lack of youth workers which would be tackled by offering a youth work accredited training . This may be training for existing volunteers of community groups meaning they can deliver youth work which I think is good.
I then talked about what the youth council are doing which includes
Taking a trip to Glasgow for research into their whole system approach and how they tackled knife crime with the hope to bring the research back to Oldham. Developing an awareness campaign with young people that can be delivered in communities and schools that is built around Oldham as a safe place to live – a more positive angle than just put down the knife.
We’re doing to work with other young people across GM and nationally to lobby, campaign and address the issues of knife crime in the up.
Finally , we’re holding a youth voice summit and one of the activities will be a knife crime conference.
